Citizen is about many things and, while race is certainly central, there is also the question of what it means to belong, not to belong and to not even want to belong.
Wendy Whelan is proving that there’s plenty of life for older dancers if there are new works that can make use of their special abilities and lifetime of experience.
William Kentridge’s chamber opera Refuse the Hour emerged amid a hurricane of clashing out-of-sync metronomes, frenetic choreography, African drumming, brass glissandi, and sound-making contraptions.
New Yorkers flocked to BAM on Thursday to celebrate the beginning of the Next Wave Festival 2014. Even more discerning audiences were just around the corner at BAM’s Harvey Theater for a program that featured soprano Dawn Upshaw and pianist Gilbert Kalish.
Part of the Next Wave Festival, 21c Liderabend achieved a delicate balance that, more times than not, New York’s larger performing arts venues fail to accomplish: an intimate experience in an extravagant, larger-scale setting.
When brainstorming ideas for his 2010 production of And then, one thousand years of peace, a co-production with Moscow’s revered Bolshoi Theatre, the French-Albanian choreographer Angelin Preljocaj stumbled upon reading the Apocalypse of St John.
David Dorfman’s Come, and Back Again is an earnest – occasionally too earnest – and authentic exploration of Mr Dorfman’s own fears of mortality and mess. Mr Dorfman presents a well-integrated whole, with a whitewashed junkyard set; video projection monologues; a live, onstage band; and a dance space that seemed to encourage straight-from-the-heart confessions and freewheeling movement.
Sō Percussion finished their four-day run of Where (we) Live on Saturday 22 December. A resplendent and confusing bonanza, the hour-long concert consisted of poignantly thin and simple melodies, intensely personal testimonial, performative carpentry, and absurdist and stop-motion film, all piled together with a demeanor of contemporary improvisation and glam rock dressed in flannel.
David Lang’s love fail, an incredible interpretation of the timeless Tristan and Isolde tale, graced the ears of all those present last night at the recently-renovated BAM Harvey Theater (remember those agonizing seats? Yikes!). Mr Lang’s non-narrative non-opera, composed for the all-female a cappella quartet Anonymous 4, miraculously limns nearly 1,000 years of tortured human relationships – with a minimum of means.
